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Working ON, Good People and Strategy is Good Business

September 14, 2017

As a small business owner, you are always on the lookout for new ways to grow and develop your business. But that isn’t always easy to do.

Most people get caught up and consumed by the little details on a day-to-day basis. We call that working in your business and not working ON your business. Doing that is not going to empower your team, and it’s going to rob you of the time and focus that you should be expending on strategic thinking. Strategy is the engineering work for scale.

Businesses cannot work well without strategy no matter the size of any business.

Employing the right people consistently will not happen in a business that has no strategy. You might be lucky and fluke it and hire a few of the right people. But in the long run if you haven’t put the time into thinking about what constitutes ‘right’ for your business or the process by which you arrive at recruiting those people, then you will get it wrong more often than right. Getting the right people in your business and getting them in the right seats is hard work. But without good people your business will not work and your clients, customers or patients will not get what they want and need and in turn neither will you. If you have hired the right people, you shouldn’t have to micro-manage them; in fact, if they are the right people, they won’t stand for your micro-management!

If you focus your day as a leader of an organisation around the strategic things you can be working through – whether it’s people and culture, new growth opportunities, revenue streams or new markets etc, you are giving your business the best opportunity for success.

Strategy and scale go hand in hand.

Your operational people should be implementing your strategy, putting structures and processes in place. Not you.

However, you are still going to get asked about operational matters. You’ll find yourself constantly getting drawn into the organisation by your team, because they want your help. After all you are the guru. You know all about the operational matters in your business and you would be seen as the go to person. The reality is you need to have the consistency and discipline to say, “No, I know you guys can handle this and I’m actually going to focus on the strategic decisions that make a difference.”

This is a great way to think about it. Your operational people are not going to do the strategy work. That is not what they do, they do the operational work. Then if you are not doing the strategy work because you’re bogged down in operations; who’s doing the strategy?

“Most of us go into business with big aspirations and in time we forget what they were.” Tom O’Toole, Beechworth Baker

When the business is starting out or it is early on this might work ok, as initially it is all hands on deck to get whatever needs doing done. But even in the earliest stages of growth you need to be working on your strategy to take things to the next level.

Strategy doesn’t happen magically. It is crucial work that you need to do.

Talk to us about how we can help implement a plan with you to ensure you have a strategy and it’s a sound one.